In order to provide cleanliness, and to reduce exposure to disease, public restroom facilities are commonly provided with fixtures that dispense paper toilet seat covers intended for temporary positioning on toilet seats by the users thereof. Body contact with the seat is thereby avoided, and the cover can be subsequently of by flusing the same down the toilet.
While the use of the covers is favored by many users of such facilities, to be economically feasible, the covers must be manufactured at the lowest possible cost. To enable high-volume, low cost production to be achieved, continuous paper cutting, shearing, and folding machines have been designed by Kerr Engineering Company of South El Monte, Calif., which automatically die cut the covers' center hole, and disjoin and fold the covers, using paper stock continuously fed to the machines from rolls of paper sheeting.
While such automated machinery allows toilet seat covers of the type described to be rapidly produced, it would be economically desirable to increase the production rate of manufacturing operations utilizing such machines even further. To enable this to be accomplished, it has been suggested in the past to stack two such machines, one on the other, so as to double the rate of toilet seat cover production from a manufacturing line. However, when such machines are stacked in more than double tiers, problems have been encountered in synchronizing the feed of the paper sheeting to the machines so that the covers exiting the individual machine tiers can be collated in sheaves and automatically removed from the processing line. Thus, for example, triply stacked machines have not been used, quite possibly because of the described difficulties encountered in collecting the covers emerging from each of the superimposed machines in collated sheaves and ejecting them from the machines in ordered files.
Furthermore, toilet seat covers manufactured by machines of the type described have traditionally been folded in half, i.e., "one-half fold" covers, during the course of their manufacture. A disadvantage of one-half fold covers, however, has been that they require relatively sizeable dispensers for storage prior to use, and these in turn necessitate significant wall space to accommodate. While such requirements does not always cause a problem, adequate space is frequently not available in restrooms, for example, in those located in buses and airplanes. Consequently, it is oftentimes desirable to provide doubly folded, or "one-quarter" fold toilet seat covers, where the covers are intended for use in restrooms with limited space.